Innholdsfortegnelse for 56.4 Winter 2023 i British Columbia History

One of the least discussed elements of British Columbia history is that all the early industries that sparked and sustained European settlement depended on Indigenous labour. Indigenous People were the hunters and trappers that the Hudson's Bay Company and, before them, other traders depended on. It was Indigenous People who drew attention to the placer gold that started the series of gold rushes, and who packed—on their backs, in their canoes, and, later, on their horses—the supplies the miners needed. The Stó:lō and Songhees were the first to operate a commercial fishery—selling salmon which was salted and exported to the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC). The Haida were among the first commercial farmers—selling potatoes to newcomers— while other groups were the first to sell trees and make shingles.1 Indigenous People were…

Labour history is difficult to access. Essentially, the story of working people is the story of their day-to-day work. Only when there is a departure from daily routine—perhaps loss of life, a bitter strike—will newspapers and other media typically turn their attention to working people. Just as typically, historians will be attracted to the same exceptional events. Even then, source material will rarely include letters or memoirs or biographies of the individuals involved. Such letters and memoirs may have been lost (or, more likely, were not created), so memoirs and biographies simply were not written. It becomes important, therefore, that surviving records of any kind are reliable. If they are not, an event or a historical figure in labour history can become even more out of focus and difficult to…

In the history of labour relations in Canadian broadcasting, private radio stands out as a sector that has almost completely resisted unionization. Through the middle decades of the twentieth century, trade unions that attempted to gain a foothold in commercial radio found a formidable opponent in radio owners, a notoriously scrappy class of entrepreneurs known for their legendary battles with federal regulators and powerful American competitors in the quest to establish a Canadian-owned, for-profit alternative to the CBC.1 It was not a complete shutout for labour. Early radio in Canada was a fragile system of small operators and experimenters in the new technology, but with the advent of the CBC in the mid-1930s, followed by television a decade or so later, the field was beginning to mature. In 1952, the…

In 1897, the silver-rich Slocan district in British Columbia's West Kootenay—with the thriving boomtowns of Sandon, New Denver, and Slocan City—was touted as the most important and productive mining district in all the province.1 By 1900, diminished by falling silver prices, demoralized by the Klondike gold rush, and devastated by crippling labour strife, the Slocan had lost its gleam. In the 1898 provincial election, the conservative-leaning administration of John Turner was replaced by Charles Semlin and a ragtag assortment of “oppositionists”—some with close ties to labour activists. One of the less publicized campaign commitments of at least some of the oppositionists was the introduction of an eight-hour law for the benefit of underground workers in hardrock mines, who typically worked ten-hour shifts. The responsibility for this in Semlin's cabinet fell…

In 1943, Nigel Morgan, an executive member of the International Woodworkers of America (IWA), told a union meeting at the Youbou Mill, west of Duncan, that “one hundred percent of the East Indians had joined the union,” a historic victory for the union and its organizer, Darshan Singh Sangha. For Punjabi and other Asian workers, the decision to join the union was not taken lightly. The barriers to union membership they faced were immense, not least of which was distrust of White-dominated unions whose history of opposing immigrant labour cut deep. Racism was widespread. Government regulations that kept wages for non-White workers lower than for White workers were a form of institutionalized discrimination. At sawmills, the entirely male workforce lived in bunkhouses on company property. Union organizers were typically prevented…

In 1897-98, settler-colonists flooded into the Crowsnest Pass and neighbouring Elk Valley, first to build a new branch line for the Canadian Pacific Railway and then to work in the booming coal mining industry that followed.1 The British Columbia entrance into the Crowsnest Pass has been a centre for coal production ever since, with early settlements at Michel and Natal (now demolished) and a later settlement at Sparwood.2 Today, coal destined for sale to AsiaPacific steelmakers is produced in a strip mine located on a mountain ridge directly above where Michel and Natal once teemed with houses, people and coal production. Coal workers have been continuously unionized at Sparwood/Natal/Michel since they organized their first union in 1902.3 In the mid-20th century, an internal union struggle pitted Michel Local 7292 of…

RESEARCHER-IN-RESIDENCE Terry has accepted BC History's invitation to sit as Researcher-in-Residence throughout 2023 as he continues to learn about the story of his great-grandmother and the personal legacies of colonial and federal policies. This is the fourth of four parts. Who was she? Who was she to me? Few people in history are considered representative of their culture, yet my great-grandmother Mejade'sse is one such individual. She was born between 1871 and 1873, of Kaska Dena-Tahltan-Tlingit ancestry. My work seeks to piece together the documentary evidence of her life and to examine the enormous changes she navigated during her lifetime and their legacies in mine. Change in her culture was driven by unquestioned governmental and legislative programs to either assimilate or obliterate First Nations’ traditions. The futures of Indigenous People…

Over the past 25 years, more and more Canadian employers in a variety of industries have turned to migrant labour on work permits to fill employment needs. About 22,000 migrant workers came to Canada in 2000, expanding to over 112,000 in 2009. In 2022, roughly 120,000 migrant worker permits were issued.1 With such growth in the country's Temporary Foreign Worker Program, workers experience frequent exploitation or abuse. Such exploitation is not exclusive to a single sector. Abused immigrant worker stories include nannies from the Philippines stuck in their employers’ homes and on duty 24 hours a day, seven days a week; Peruvian migrant farm workers killed while being transported from work; seasonal farm labourers from Mexico poisoned from pesticides; Filipino workers at a Denny's restaurant who failed to receive overtime…

Women played essential roles as activists in a divided community during the Great Vancouver Island Coal Miners’ Strike. Their activism during the 1912–1914 strike and the 1913 riots had unjust consequences that rippled through the community for generations. The strike centred on miners’ rights, particularly the struggle for unionization, along with demands for safer working conditions and higher wages. Just three years earlier, a deadly explosion at the Extension mine had claimed 32 lives. In September 1912, Oscar Mottishaw was fired from the Cumberland mine by Canadian Collieries (Dunsmuir) Ltd., which had purchased the Dunsmuirowned mines a few years earlier, targeted because he was a union organizer for the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA).1 In protest, Cumberland miners walked off the job and Extension miners followed suit the next…

To hear a couple of thousand people singing to the tune of a well-known Woody Guthrie song, So long, it's been good to know you (3x) Your cutting and slashing's gone on far too long So you'd better be drifting along! was a delight to the ears of the group that wrote the lyrics—demonstrating that music could do what the best speeches do: enhearten, unite, and celebrate. It happened at the site of a huge rally against the Social Credit government on October 15, 1983. Some sixty thousand people marched past the Hotel Vancouver, the site that day of the Social Credit Party's annual meeting, to the plaza outside the Queen Elizabeth Theatre, on Georgia Street, where speaker after speaker excoriated the government and its 26 bills and sang along…